Countdown to Oscars

Posts Tagged ‘Trent Reznor’

A version of this story first appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter.

“Is it good? I’m not sure, but I know I worked my ass off,” Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman/Oscar-winning film composer told me of his latest score — the one that he and Atticus Ross put together for David Fincher’s smash-hit Gone Girl — when we sat down for an hour-long conversation a few weeks ago in Beverly Hills.

It took a while for me to accept that the person sitting across from me — a clean-cut, soft-spoken and polite family man just months shy of his 50th birthday — is the same one behind NIN, the post-punk “industrial rock” band that he founded in 1988. Ever since, the band has churned out a constant flow of hit songs like “Closer” and “Something I Can Never Have” — the sort of music that my generation grew up listening to when we were brooding or wanted to piss off our parents — en route to more than 20 million album sales worldwide, two Grammys and coming very close, this year, to earning an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

When I began research for this post, I assumed there would be a noticeable correlation between Academy Award Best Picture winners and Best Original Score winners. A safe assumption, I thought, because of how important music is to cinema (have you ever watched a scene before music was added?). Music provides emotional thrust to a film. It creates suspense, amplifies poignant moments, and brings settings to life. Additionally, music can shape our memory of a given film. How many iconic movies—The Godfather (1972), Star Wars (1977), Jaws (1975), Psycho (1960)—have themes that we automatically recall as soon as the movie’s title comes up?

Yet in the thirteen Academy Awards since and including 2000, only three Best Picture winners also took home Best Original Score and of the eighty-five films that were nominated for Best Picture in this time period, only about one third of them were even nominated for Best Original Score.

Voting was conducted Sunday afternoon to determine the honorees for the 37th annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, which will take plane Jan. 13 at the InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles, and while no single film dominated the honors, one studio certainly did.

Now that we’re weeks away from David Fincher’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” adaptation reaching theaters, the marketing campaign for what’s shaping up to be a visceral take on Stieg Larsson’s best-seller can kick into high gear.

At Sunday night’s 83rd Academy Awards, “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” will compete for the best picture Oscar, which will be the last of 24 to be presented. Though “The King’s Speech” is the clear favorite to win, there are still a few reasons to believe that “The Social Network” could pull off an upset, so it will be a nerve-wracking night for a lot of us who feel we have something riding on the outcome. There may, however, be a semi-reliable way to gauge the likely outcome earlier in the evening.

In addition to best picture, “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” will also be competing against each in six other categories that will be presented first: best director, best actor, best cinematography, best film editing, best original score, and best sound mixing. There’s no guarantee that one or the other will win in each of those categories, or that, if that happens, those wins will in any way correspond with the winner of the best picture category (which is the only one determined by a preferential balloting system), but it might offer us some early clues about how passionately voters feel — or don’t feel — about each of the films.

Question: Which were the last performances by a man and by a woman to be rewarded with Oscars without first being recognized by any of the major critics/journalists awards? (I’m referring to the National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Broadcast Film Critics Association, and Hollywood Foreign Press Association.)

Prize: The first person to correctly answer this question in the comments section below will win the soundtrack to “The Social Network,” composed by best original score Oscar nominees Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. (Be sure to provide your email address so that we can contact you for your mailing address in the event that you win!)

CONTEST OVER:The first person to identify Alan Arkin for “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006) and Tilda Swinton for “Michael Clayton” (2005) was my fellow Oscar blogger Guy Lodge (via a direct message on Twitter), but Guy graciously declined to accept the prize so that a reader might get it, and the first reader to identify those two names was Eric Nehss, who will be contacted shortly — congratulations!

Gold Derby: Tariq Khan provides five reasons why he thinks “The King’s Speech” can still beat “The Social Network” to win the best picture Oscar. He suggests: (1) It will lead the field in nominations, as have 75% of the films that went on to win best picture over the past 40 years have; (2) It will do especially well with actors, who comprise the largest branch of the Academy; (3) It will win the SAG Award for best ensemble, as did fellow long-shot best picture hopefuls “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) and “Crash” (2005) en route to their wins; (4) It will be helped by the preferential ballot because it will register highly — even if not first — on most ballots; and (5) It will get a boost because it is now regarded as the underdog. (How he can assert any of these things with such confidence is beyond me. I know that the bookies in Las Vegas sure aren’t buying into his argument at the moment.)

Entertainment Weekly: Owen Gleiberman, one of the magazine’s film critics, begs to differ with his fellow EW staff member Dave Karger, with Khan, and with all others who are still betting against “The Social Network,” penning a piece entitled, “Here’s Why ‘The King’s Speech’ (As Good As It Is) Won’t Win Best Picture” in which he suggests — as others have long suggested — that the zeitgeist will be the decisive factor. (“The movie that ends up winning the Academy Award for best picture often taps into and gives voice to something that’s happening in the culture at large.”) He writes, “‘The King’s Speech’ is a movie that very much tries to speak to our time… [and] by the time it gets to ‘the king’s speech’ has become an allegory for the age of Barack Obama… [it] seems to have been timed for how a lot of people felt about Obama during the days when he was running for president… a story in America that no longer links up to where a great many people stand (even those of us who still support Obama avidly).”

Yahoo! Movies: Will Leitch wonders why the team behind “The Social Network” is suddenly going out of its way to be nice to the subject of their film, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After winning the best screenplay Golden Globe, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said, “I wanted to say to Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re watching tonight, Rooney Mara’s character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie, and she was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary and an altruist.” After winning the best picture (drama) Golden Globe, producer Scott Rudin said, “I want to thank everybody at Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg for his willingness to allow us to use his life and work as a metaphor through which to tell a story about communication and the way we relate to each other.” And another producer of the film, Dana Brunetti, Tweeted a photo of himself arm-in-arm on the red carpet with none other than Randi Zuckerberg, Mark’s older sister and Facebook’s marketing director. So… what brought about all of this “friending”?

UPI: An unattributed report, citing statistics compiled by the Rentrak tracking service, indicates that “The Social Network,” which was released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 11, was the top-selling and top-rented title of the week ending on January 16.

The Hollywood Reporter: Pamela McClintock reports that Fox Searchlight has planned “a big return” for its awards hopeful “127 Hours,” which has grossed only $11.1 million to date and is now playing in only 76 theaters. The studio is apparently hoping to “take advantage of expected attention from the Oscars” by re-releasing it in over 600 locations the week after nominations are announced. (They mounted a similar theatrical comeback for “The Last King of Scotland” in 2006, which resulted in $14 million more in ticket sales.)

The Awl: Richard Rushfield, who was the editor of the entertainment section at the Los Angeles Times when I wrote a blog for their Web site, pens a rather contrarian op-ed about “The Social Network” in which he describes the film as “a pack of lies that conveys nothing about our time.” He acknowledges that it is “a finely crafted work” and that “the acting is impeccable, the dialogue is zippy and zings along,” but alleges, “The jilted love affair that drives Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook is invented. The resentment against the Harvard elite clubs that drives him to create an alternate society is invented. The claims of others involved in the creation of Facebook are given vastly too much credence in the film. [And] Zuckerberg is portrayed as an angry, vengeful sociopath, which by most accounts and all appearances, he is not.” (There are numerous people, however, who would dispute each of his allegations. For starters, Google the name Jessica Alona.)

PLEASE NOTE: The following rankings and remarks reflect my personal opinions and do/will not in any way impact my projections or analysis on this site, wherein I strive above all else to correctly forecast what will happen, not what I believe should happen. My demonstrated ability to do that over the years is what has led most of you to my site, and any failure to do that will undoubtedly lead you away from it, so you can rest assured that I mean it when I say that one has/will have no bearing on the other.

Wall Street Journal: Roger Ebert writes — less than a week after the MPAA overturned the NC-17 rating that it had initially bestowed upon “Blue Valentine” for a sex scene — that “The MPAA should have changed its standards long ago, taking into account the context and tone of a movie instead of holding fast to rigid checklists.” He notes, “In the 42 years since Jack Valenti proudly unveiled his new [MPAA] ratings system, our national standards of taste have changed. Some might say they’ve become more vulgar, others might say more relaxed, but grade school students now talk like truck drivers did in 1970… The rise of cable TV, home video and the Internet also means that many American children have pragmatic knowledge of what the human body looks like unclothed and what it can do while in that state. This may be unfortunate, but it is a fact.” He suggests, “Only three categories are needed: “G,” for young audiences, “T” for teenagers, and “A” for adults. These categories would be not be keyed to specific content but would reflect the board’s considered advice about a film’s gestalt and intended audience… It’s time to admit we’ve lost our innocence.”

Showbiz411: Roger Friedman reports that Sofia Coppola features seven members of the “notoriously unprofessional” Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation, the organization which determines the winners of the Golden Globe Awards, in her new film “Somewhere.” (They make cameos as journalists asking foolish questions of a movie star during a film press conference.) Friedman believes that this is an “unethical and laughable” conflict of interest, whether or not they were compensated, which remains unclear. The HFPA will announce this year’s Golden Globe nominations tomorrow morning.

New York Times Magazine: Frank Bruni explores the impressive resume of 12-year-old best supporting actress hopeful Elle Fanning (“Somewhere”), who already has “more than 15 movies behind her and a few prominent, career-accelerating roles straight ahead.” Elle, the younger sister of the 16-year-old actress Dakota Fanning, already has friends in high places: former child star Jodie Foster saw her in “Phoebe in Wonderland” (2008) and says, “I was blown away by that performance — blown away. She should have been nominated for an Oscar. I think Elle Fanning is just so amazing.”

New York Times: Carlo Rotella profiles Charles Portis, the author from Arkansas “who politely declines to promote himself or his work,” and whose 1968 work “True Grit” — which Rotella calls “the great comic Western novel” — inspired this year’s Ethan Coen and Joel Coen film of the same title. According to Rotella, “Portis’s characters have a self-conscious manner, a homespun formality of speech, that comes from the effort to inhabit grandiose roles: lone avenger on a quest; nefarious outlaw; besieged moral exemplar. If that sounds like a description of Cormac McCarthy’s characters, the great difference is that Portis finds comedy in the aspiration to heroism, and his characters are forever plagued by a suspicion of their own ridiculousness.”

National Public Radio: Bob Mondello analyzes “The Company Men,” a film which stars Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, and Tommy Lee Jones as white-collar workers who lose their jobs as a result of the recent economic downturn. Mondello correctly notes that people usually try “to get away from real-world concerns” when they go to the movies, and that “Up in the Air” “plumbed this same well” last awards season, but he feels that this one is worth a look nonetheless. “Yes, the film’s a little didactic as it lays out the issues,” he writes, “But when it comes to the emotional state of those being laid off, of their families and even of those doing the laying off, it gets things right enough to make audiences squirm.”